Virtual and overlay network technology has significantly improved the implementation of communication and data networks in terms of efficiency, cost, and processing power. In a software defined network (SDN) architecture, an overlay network may be built on top of an underlay network. Nodes within the overlay network may be connected via virtual and/or logical links that may correspond to nodes and physical links in the underlay network. The overlay network may be partitioned into virtual network instances (e.g. Internet Protocol (IP) subnets) that may simultaneously execute different applications and services using the underlay network. Further, virtual resources, such as computational, storage, and/or network elements may be flexibly redistributed or moved throughout the overlay network. For instance, hosts and virtual machines (VMs) within a data center may migrate to any server with available resources to run applications and provide services. As a result, virtual and overlay network technology has been central to improving today's communication and data network by reducing network overhead while improving network throughput.
In an overlay network, multicast may sometimes be preferred over unicast, since multicast may achieve delivery of a data frame comprising a multicast address to a group of destination nodes simultaneously in a single transmission from the source. Copies of the data frame may be automatically replicated in intermediate network nodes (e.g., routers), when the topology of the overlay network so requires it. In an overlay network, e.g., of a data center, there may potentially be many multicast groups each with a multicast address. Existing multicast solutions may require intermediate nodes to maintain state for each multicast address. This may create unnecessary processing burden for some hypervisors implemented on servers, especially when there is only a small portion of hypervisors that actually need to process multicast data frames.